On the face of it the Sheikhallah bazaar is just the shabby little side street in Irbil where you go to change money. But the whole of "liberated" Kurdistan knows that another, more serious business is being conducted behind those counters piled high with debased Iraqi banknotes.

Emigration is the Kurdish national obsession, and it is here that the would-be emigrants begin the long, clandestine, perilous yet highly organised odyssey in containers and ramshackle hulks to the Europe of promise and plenty.

It is here that they acquire a false passport. For none of Kurdistan's 3.6m inhabitants has a legitimate one.

As Iraqis they are entitled to one, but they dare not go to Baghdad to get it. Saddam Hussein is the reason, above all, why they want to leave.

"We have had 60 or 70 years of war, or the laws of war," said Azar Barwari, a Kurdistan Democratic party (KDP) official.

"Saddam was the worst, the summit of chauvinism and brutality. It is enough that he is still there, however weakened. We fear another Anfal [the chemical attacks in which an estimated 180,000 civilians died], genocide, liquidation. It is a fear inside every Kurd."

There are economic and social reasons too for wanting to migrate.

Unemployment is high and, for most, salaries very low. The recent coming of satellite television has greatly enhanced the allure of exile.

"I know that if you really look carefully, it shows a negative as well as a positive side of Europe," said Samar Fawzi, a law student at Sulaymaniyah University, who tried and failed to get to Britain, "but lots see it as a kind of paradise."

And some do make good and return - on holiday, to buy a house, or to marry a local girl - with real money in their pockets.

But the most impressive evidence that the political imperative outweighs the economic one is that this is a society where, unusually, the rich emigrate as ardently as the poor.

Huge cost

The decision to go often involves an enormous investment, psychologically as well as economically. Families may sell off most of their possessions to finance it: it costs twice as much to get to Europe as it does to build a modest house.

Partly because of the steadily growing web of contacts with the west, "liberated" Kurdistan has become a main source of Kurdish emigration; more - probably 30,000-plus last year - leave here than from Baghdad-controlled territory, where conditions are infinitely worse, or from Iranian Kurdistan.

The Kurdish regional government (KRG) tries to discourage emigration, through youth training centres, debates in parliament, and group marriages, and television programmes highlighting the miseries of European asylum centres, the difficulties of adjustment, and the exploitation of and prejudice against immigrants.

"But you surely know that not just Kurds, half the Middle East would emigrate if it could. We can't physically stop them," the deputy prime minister Sami Abdul Rahman said.

Like Europeans planning their summer holidays or stock market investments, they know the exact price and risks of every route and destination.

The passports are smuggled from Baghdad with the help of corrupt officials. The current price is $1 000 (£700) for a virgin one, $400 for a used one that has been "cleaned".

The passport serves one purpose only: legal entry into Turkey. After that it is thrown away. Turkey offers the Kurds 40 visas a day, half of them through Massoud Barzani's KDP, which sells them for $90, half through the Turcoman Front, a Turkish created party ostensibly representing "liberated" Kurdistan's 10,000 Turcomans, which sells them for $600.

The cheap visa means a long wait, the expensive one is "express". With a virgin passport the fugitive stands a much better chance at the frontier than with a used one. But the supply does not match demand. The alternative is to be smuggled over the frontier, often through Iran. That is cheaper - $350 - and quicker but, with mines and the Turkish army, it is perilous.

"My brother went that way," Mahdi Abdul Rahman said. "He only lost his kidney, but nine of his companions were killed when a helicopter, thinking they were PKK guerrillas, attacked them near Van."

The next stop on the standard route is Istanbul, where contact is made with a representative of the international smuggling network, almost always a Kurd, who arranges the sea or land crossing to Greece. The current cost is $2,000 to $2,200.

At this point it is not only those who are captured, drowned, or asphyxiated in containers who fail to make it. Some, like Ary Ahmad, an unemployed technician in Sulaymaniyah, just grow too dispirited to continue.

"After five days hiding in a seaside building site at Bodrum and waiting for a boat that never came, I called it off," he said. "I had a valid passport and Turkish visa, after all."

His companions eventually fetched up on a Greek island near the Turkish coast, and from there took the regular tourist ferry to the mainland.

On arrival in Athens they phoned their families back home and the $2,000 already deposited with a third party was handed over to the network.

From Athens the fugitive can take a plane to western Europe. But that is the deluxe route, only possible with a stolen European passport, whose bearer requires no entry visa; and at $6,000, only a tiny handful can afford it.

The other, normal, route is across the Adriatic by Albanian fishing boat, or secreted inside a long vehicle on a ferry. Current cost: between $1,000 and $1,200. The rest, by train, bus or car from Italy to France, Britain or Germany, is relatively cheap - $400 - and easy.

Rejection

The great drawback now, however, is that asylum itself has become much more difficult to acquire as Europe clamps down on the traffic. There are 9,000 unaccepted Kurdish asylum seekers in the Netherlands alone.

"I hear that in Britain there is now a rejection rate of 90%," the humanitarian affairs minister, Shafiq Qazzaz, said. "There is more and more talk of 'voluntary repatriation'. And the point of view is developing that our safe haven is, after all, safe."

But the upshot of a recent debate in the Swedish parliament was that, in truth, it is not safe. There lies the nub.

"In my view more and more Kurds will try to get to Europe, if only because there are so many already there," said Fakhir Barzani, of the ministry of humanitarian affairs. "The only solution lies here in Kurdistan, and it requires western and UN involvement."

Obliging Baghdad to respect resolution 986 and spend oil-for-food money on development and income support is the lesser part of it, because solid long-term investment will only come when there is political security. And that, Kurds say, can only come with the completion of what the world left incomplete when, under resolution 688 of April 1991, it created the safe haven and the US and Britain added their no-fly zones.

The world may have largely forgotten about 688, a call for the Kurds' "human and political rights" to be respected. But to them it is holy writ, a vital legitimisation of their cause which should be built on until they achieve a secure, legal and internationally recognised status, either the independence they dream of or the federation within a post-Saddam Iraq they realistically aim for.

Without that, they fear, the worst will happen again. "And believe me," Fakhir Barzani said, "next time you could have millions clamouring at the gates of Europe."